What makes a movement? Users? (Mozilla) Local groups?

Last week, Mark Surman wrote a couple of articles about Join Mozilla initiative. I was not very surprised as probably other fellows, since I knew about this from Whistler Summit.
We talked during engagement sessions about different ways to make Mozilla more visible as a movement for the (open) Web and for the commons.
Indeed, this is something that Mozilla needs now, critical for the Web and for a healthy community of contributors and users. .

Bogo wrote in his last post wondering about the role of people who will join Mozilla and how they will connect with the community, how they will become advocates for the open web.

LUGs were an example of movements created around users and a software platform, which built a strong base of evangelists and open source advocates some time ago, including myself.

I was 16 when I first attended a first Linux Install Fest and started running the first Linux Users Group in my city with some friends, just for fun. I had no idea about free software, Commons, open source, etc. and I was able to only write 2 or 3 commands in the terminal.
LUGs were engaging, easy to join, and nobody asked you about your experience. City-based groups helped to arrange monthly or bi-weekly meet-ups. The main aim was getting people to use the operating system and helping beginners to fix their problems and offer support.
InstallFest-like events, with non-fixed agenda, no slides or presentations, helped to set up the dynamics, and make both experienced and unexperienced users to attend.

During the years, I organized myself a couple of InstallFests/Hackfests and other low or 0 budget events, connected with other users and LUGs across the country, revitalized the group from my faculty and extended it all around city, in hacking camps, workshops and open source conferences around the country, unified the forces faculty’s web group and start organizing more diverse events, wrote articles in community and school magazines.
Community centers, co-working spaces, Students house, laboratories, libraries and coffees or empty spaces in the underground Faculty’s building usually served for hosting the meet-ups and local events.

In a few years this movement brought new users, from power users to advocates of the platform and, indeed, influenced a lot its adoption on servers and embedded devices. But also, it formed advocates for other free software projects and kept the hacker culture alive.

LUGs offered you the freedom to choose, to stay as a simple user or go further. It also created this affinity between communities and people sharing the same principles, so connecting to people from outside your country became far easier.

I never became an active contributor in a Linux distribution, a localizer or package maintainer, because I wasn’t too comfortable with writing code, but that didn’t made me to not feel part of the movement or name myself a Linux Users group member.

So users are never “death souls” in the community, as far as they are engaged and empowered.

Hopefully, Join Mozilla! will offer all the support and material to turn Firefox users into platform advocates and a strong voice for the (open) Web. It is a chance for current Mozilla communities to build the user engagement efforts and start facilitating and supporting in a creative and participatory way Firefox users in all cities.

As LUG how-to says: “Computer user groups are not new. In fact, they were central to the personal computer’s history: Microcomputers arose in large part to satisfy demand for affordable, personal access to computing resources from electronics, ham radio, and other hobbyist user groups. Giants like IBM eventually discovered the PC to be a good and profitable thing, but initial impetus came from the grassroots.”

PS: Happy to see this open, so all Mozillians from community can contribute to build the program through Mozilla community marketing calls (and on #marketing IRC channel): http://wiki.mozilla.org/JoinMozilla .